UN Council: Seriously, Nations, Stop Switching Off the Internet! (article19.org) 59
An anonymous reader writes:
"The United Nations officially condemned the practice of countries shutting down access to the internet at a meeting of the Human Rights Council on Friday," reports the Register newspaper, saying Friday's resolution "effectively extends human rights held offline to the internet," including freedom of expression. "The resolution is a much-needed response to increased pressure on freedom of expression online in all parts of the world," said Thomas Hughes, Executive Director of Article 19, a long-standing British human rights group which had pushed for the resolution. "From impunity for the killings of bloggers to laws criminalizing legitimate dissent on social media, basic human rights principles are being disregarded to impose greater controls over the information we see and share online."
Thirteen countries, including Russia and China, had unsuccessfully urged the deletion of the text guaranteeing internet access, and Article 19 says the new resolution even commits states to address "security concerns on the Internet in accordance with their obligations to protect freedom of expression, privacy and other human rights online." But they also called the resolution a missed opportunity to urge states to strengthen protections on anonymity and encryption, and to clarify the boundaries between state and private ICT actors.
Thirteen countries, including Russia and China, had unsuccessfully urged the deletion of the text guaranteeing internet access, and Article 19 says the new resolution even commits states to address "security concerns on the Internet in accordance with their obligations to protect freedom of expression, privacy and other human rights online." But they also called the resolution a missed opportunity to urge states to strengthen protections on anonymity and encryption, and to clarify the boundaries between state and private ICT actors.
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So we're better off 'cause we have a concept of it at least in the language?
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Yes you are. You have a clear opportunity to communicate what you want or expect when you can actually express it via communication (language). When you cannot express it, you are frustrated endlessly by an inability to communicate.
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I can actually relate. We really need a word for having a government that works of the people, by the people and for the people. Too bad nobody ever got that idea before.
Re:Reservations (Score:5, Informative)
as a Gartner analyst wrote, there is no equivalent concept of "privacy" in the Chinese language.
Then what does yinsi [wiktionary.org] mean?
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Yes, the analyst pointed out that but suggested the meaning wasn't really the same. Perhaps the right to family life would provide a pathway to the same meaning? Cultural differences, political history and all that..
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The analyst is full of bullshit.
They have a freaking kanji for it. [chinese-word.com]
How can they have a kanji for Privacy and "Confidential, private matters", if they dont have a concept for it?
Granted, the chinese government has been strongly trying to delete/revise/repurpose kanji for years now for purely political reasons-- so perhaps this is one of those they have tried to delete--- but still. China knows what privacy is.
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Anybody that thinks they can get privacy through politics is nuts. And since we have none, we should do what we can to make sure the government doesn't either. They won't respect ours unless they suffer the same consequences.
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You mean 'de facto genocide by Israel' i suppose, given the actual facts on the ground.
And yes UN has done nothing concrete against Israel's crimes, proving its total inability to confront brutish racist criminal regimes like Isreal, North Korea, etc, either powerful in themselves or are protected by powerful states.
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It's funny, how on one hand, Israel is doing genocide, and on the other hand, we've been occupying palestine for 40 years now. Are we really that slow in genociding? Or maybe you're just stretching the definition of genocide?
Don't get me wrong, we are occupying land that is not ours and seriously messing up palestinian lives, but they are living, which is well... what genocide would have stopped.
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...did you forget the part when you said 'modern times'?
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I suppose deniers like you think just because there are millions of Holocaust survivors, that "facts on the ground" don't support that was a genocide too.
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Please feel free to link to ANY information indicating how Israel is committing genocide, as that requires you to point to them murdering people who are trying to mind their own business, I am sure that it will be a long wait.
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/me drops a pea in your beer.
Did you perhaps mean pee that means to urinate instead of pea that is a small green fruit?
Re:Whose beautiful idea was this? (Score:5, Funny)
Yeah, 'cause the UN is such a small organization it can only handle one topic at a time.
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It's funny how those that attack the UN constantly overlook it's actual flaws and keep attacking the things that actually WORK about it. We HAD an organisation like they want after World War 1, the bond of nations, and it was a complete and unmitigated disaster.
Ultimately both the BoN and the UN were created with the same purpose: to prevent another world war. Thus far the UN has succeeded where the BoN did not.
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Why do you think they can (not) handle so many issues at once?
Laughing so hard I nearly ....... myself! (Score:1)
I hope everybody is as cynical as me. The worlds spies rely on the internet more than the worlds activists. Lets be honest. Where did the FBI get a list of people to "visit" prior to the upcoming GOP convention. Would that list have existed without an active internet to mine?
It's a sunny and too warm holiday weekend by the Beach
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Where did the FBI get a list of people to "visit" prior to the upcoming GOP convention.
Likely the same place that police find criminals posting about their crimes, with evidence in tow. On social media. The people who want to go out and cause shit or problems aren't exactly the brightest people in our society, and they'll relentlessly brag about how they're going to do xyz thing because it makes them feel good. The FBI doing that? That's good policing and a good example that they're actually catching on to how stupid people have shifted. It's also changed the nature of informants.
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Several years ago I went to a presentation at Oracle Open World, where they were gushing about the ability to integrate real-time public internet data into a system that could be used by police to keep ahead of protests (where/when/who).
My point was that these police and intelligence agencies would be blind without a functioning internet. The budget cutting and "small government" liars have created a system with a single point of failure, that's the real issue here. There are very few dedicated circuits
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Well, duh. Why do you think the council condemns switching off the internet but not the elimination of privacy?
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The FBI managed to create a list of "communists" across the US in the 1940s and 1950s, so I dont really think they would have any issues if the internet didnt exist...
Stop with the cute article titles (Score:4, Insightful)
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Upcoming headlines:
"UN Council: I just, like, can't even, China!"
"UN Council: Russia, you're being totally problematic. Not cool!"
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Second Order -- not silly (Score:2)
Sure, like everything else from the UNO this will be more honored in the breech than the observance. Don't you think the bureaucrats and diplomats know this? But if they say nothing, then by implication, depriving access becomes legitimate government policy.
What really happens is the depriving internet access becomes more grounds for sanctions and other measures that are desired for other reasons.
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The "backbone" is part of the problem. Ad hoc eliminates the need to have one. Instead of one big pipe that can be cut, you have millions of little ones that will be unstoppable. Freedom wins!
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That wont work with lots of traffic. The more pipes there are, the more you need to isolate traffic, otherwise the TCP messages alone will start to saturate the pipes.
It is important to remember that even with a fully meshed network, there will be sections of the mesh that have more traffic traversing it than others. The messages are not evenly and uniformly distributed-- and with wireless technologies being used as the medium, there is only so much bandwidth that the spectrum can provide you in a given loc
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I'm more optimistic. New technology is always forthcoming. Right now we are arguing whether man will ever fly. Things that appear impossible now are, in reality, merely difficult.
I figure if you need more bandwidth, you connect to more nodes. And DHCP, DNS, TCP/IP, etc will be depreciated, they will have to be for it to work. We're still at the horse and buggy stage with this stuff. I will know we will start making at least minimal progress when the computer is ready to use when I turn it on, not waiting fo
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There may be subtle means of embedding "seditious" signals inside benign sources of RF energy. Say, the energy leaking from a high voltage power line.
The speed wouldn't be too good, but when you just want to get your message out, the speed of delivery isn't so important.
Then there is your typical, ordinary steganography. You have a normal network connection transmitting seemingly ordinary data packets, but the packets have a very low bandwidth hidden channel of communication embedded in them using some cle
dependancy (Score:3)
It seems to me that the UN Human Rights Council doesn't grasp that as long as people are dependant on others, there will always be someone subjegating people. As people become more dependant on others, the centralized power becomes because if the government can control XYZ then they can cause societies to grind to a halt. If they really want to improve the situation of all people then they should be pushing projects that could give people the ability to be autonomous through technology. Governments are terrified of a lack of centralized control because then the people can tell their governments to fuck off. If you want people to be free of tyrants then they have to obtain freedom to go it alone.
What people need are automated and decentralized manufacturing and agriculture to create a post-scarcity economy.
Dumb question (Score:2)
Since when did the right to internet access take priority over the right to safe drinking water?
There's free wifi wherever I look. Hell, the phone box down the road from me has it.
Water fountain? There's a public recreation area I can see from my bedroom. I've been all over it. Not one single water fountain. There's a cafe at the far end which is open for like three weeks in August, that's it. Even they don't offer water.
Something is very, very wrong here.